CCSS: Autonomous Drone and Ground Robot Cooperative Tasking in Complex Indoor Environments

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The requirements for automated inventory and precise location of items have become vital to modern supply chain management. The objective of this project is to create an innovative ground robot-drone network system, which consists of a group of autonomous ground robots and drones, to provide inventory counts and precise locations of passive radio-frequency identification (pRFID) tagged items in highly complex environments, such as warehouses, retail stores, hazmat storage facilities, or factories. This project will significantly improve the state-of-the-art of supply chain management and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, and provide a significant step forward to fully harvest the potential of the proposed robotic-drone platform. The project's education plan includes developing and enhancing various undergraduate and graduate-level courses. Graduate and undergraduate students will be exposed to the state-of-the-art techniques, and gain hands-on experience in the cutting-edge technology that is at the very frontier of modern communications, circuits, and sensing systems (CCSS). Outcomes from this project will be disseminated through technical publications, conference presentations, a project website, and at the bi-annual Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center (WEREC) and RFID Lab meetings. The team is fully committed to promoting participation from under-represented groups in research, and will continue such efforts via outreach, e.g., through the NSF REU and RET programs and collaboration with HBCUs.The pRFID technology has been widely deployed in the past decade for serialized item level identification and data sharing. However, most pRFID technology implementations utilize fixed reader points, or human operated handheld scanners, and cannot provide precise item location. The demand of logistics visibility requires automated inventory and the precise location information of items. In the proposed research, the autonomous ground robot-drone network system combined with a precise RFID localization method will bridge the above gap. By deploying cooperative ground robots and drones, mounted with commercial off-the-shelf pRFID equipment, to provide automated inventory and precise location of pRFID tagged items. The framework cooperates heterogeneous individual items into a coherent system for more complex task that is not possible for any individual item. The proposed architecture will also provide an innovative communication, control, and computing framework for general IoT systems. The framework will be disclosed as open-source tools to boost relevant research in the CCSS community. The following thrusts will be accomplished in this project. (i) Ground robot and drone network architecture: the architecture will be developed to provide communication, computing, and control for the ground robot and drone to cooperatively operate for generic tasks. It also provides the fundamental methods for the ground robot and drone to pair with each other to form a symbiotic system. (ii) Ground robot and drone indoor navigation: a ground robot enhanced mechanism will be introduced to enable drone(s) to precisely localize itself in the complex indoor environment. When the localization goals are achieved, a method will be investigate to enable the drone(s) and ground robot to safely and efficiently navigate in an object-rich and confined space environment. (iii) Accurate inventory counts and precise localization of pRFIDs: the ground robot-drone network will be prototyped to operate pRFID inventory and provide precise location of pRFID tagged items. (iv) This project also includes a thorough integration and assessment plan, to test the proposed ground robot-drone integrated system in real warehouse and retail store environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.